Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady (Part 24)
By Emily Ho
Editor’s Note: The author runs an ice-cream parlor on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. When time allows, she draws caricatures and writes. This series consists of semi-autobiographical anecdotes blending fact and fiction.
Nightmare on the Main Street
“DING… DING… DING.” Lamma Islanders each have two alarm clocks. One rests at home near a soft mattress. A concrete building at the ferry pier holds the other.
The first clock ruthlessly replaces sweet dreams with cruel reality, but at least people can silence it by pressing a button and maybe resume sleeping. The second one is harsher, signaling that a ferry is ready to sail. No one has a foolproof way to beg the ferry-company gatekeeper to hold the gate open for a few extra seconds.
“Seven o’clock is 7 o’clock!” declares the gatekeeper, like a commander-in-chief. Then the iron gate clangs shut. Passengers arriving later must wait for the next ferry while considering excuses for tardiness to tell their bosses or teachers.
Once as Emily ran on three-inch high-heels to catch a ferry (most passengers reach the pier at the last minute), her left foot twisted. She felt something very painful, like a tearing sensation, happen in her left knee.
Suddenly, Emily couldn’t run. All she could do was take off her high-heel shoes and slowly drag toward the turnstile. Tears of pain rolled down her face as she bit-by-bit entered the ferry cabin and found a seat.
Then Emily noticed a bump the size of a ping-pong ball on her injured knee. When the ferry reached Central, she hobbled to a taxi and rushed to the nearest hospital for a checkup and treatment.
After MRI and X-ray checks, the emergency-room doctor told Emily: “You need an operation on your knee.”
“An operation!” cried Emily. In her entire life, she’d never been hospitalized, let alone had surgery. Even her birth had taken place not at a hospital, but in a poorly equipped midwife’s room on Cheung Chau Island.
Despite happening in the daytime, that run-for-the-ferry mishap turned into Emily’s nightmare on the Main Street.
Coming Soon:
The Labor Day (more Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady)
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